The day began with the presentation of Dr. Saeed K. Al Dhaheri, Advisor- Minister of Foreign Affairs in Information Systems, U.A.E. on Cities Strategic Framework for Transition to Smart Cities and Government. His presentation revolved around reinventing cities through citizen innovation, community involvement and co-creation efforts that can deliver promising results to improve the standard of living for citizens.

The Q and A session that followed discussed the overuse of the term 'smart' that has increasingly become meaningless; smart technologies leading to over consumption of resources; resolving over consumption by increased awareness; notion of cooperating and not competing.

A Singaporean case study on 'Singapore's smart city imperatives' and The Road to a Smart Nation: Scenarios for Capability Development presented by Mr. Chan Meng Khoong, Chief, IT Strategy & Management Practice / Evangelist, e-Government Leadership, National University of Singapore, emphasised on the smart city success criteria and imperatives and the 2020 global megatrends that are reshaping the societies and economies around the world.

Khoong presented a brief history of Singapore's eGovernment journey and concluded his presentation by emphasizing on Singapore's IT leadership development pattern that requires augmentation with the advancement of technologies and resources.

In a session on ICT Changes' Impact on cities Transition- Mr. Zaur Hasanov, Director, Trans-Eurasian Information Super Highway" (TASIM) Secretariat, Ministry of Communications and High Technologies, Republic of Azerbaijan, emphasised on the global localisation of digital content based on Azerbaijan demographics and data center research. The first half of his presentation highly dwelt on stats and figures of Azerbaijan IT traffic drivers and international internet bandwidth.

Another presentation on global best practices in smart cities, governments and knowledge based nations by Mr. Siim Sikkut, ICT Policy Adviser, Government Office of Estonia, elaborated on innovative governments and their strategies in building a digital society. He introduced the Estonian government and briefed about their old legacy systems that have been hindered and the new systems that are completely digitalized ranging from digital signatures to online tax files. He summarized the digital life of e-Estonia with a handful of interesting slides and examples
(c) 2014 Emirates News Agency (WAM) Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).